Artur Friedberg 
‘Minor Planet’ Called Vertynsky and Other Stories 
Thirteen Contemporary Stories

This bundle of stories describes about events often placed at tumultuous times of the twenties century. The plots of the stories are skillfully skimmed throughout different, well known places and times, and at which the people involved had been struggling with the adversities of their fate. returning home by long distance train, old and tired Alexander Vertynsky, a well known singer, is recalling different periods of his life, full of dramatic events and artistic travels around the world, and people he met… Back in Soviet Union, and giving hundreds of concerts in the whole country, he never got recognition of his effort by the official media (press, radio). All that, on high orders from the ‘top, ‘ the beginning of the World War II (1939), in the Polish city of Vilno, was presented from a perspective of a child. The story is followed by reminiscences of an old man, who visited the same city in 2004, and found it under the Lithuanian name Vilnius. He was trying to restore his memory about some places and events from the past. Meanwhile he also touches upon the very tragic and not always too well known lot of the people living in the city, and of that whole part of Eastern Europe, under the occupation of Hitler’s Germany during the 1940s. when the members of the White Russian’s military unit called ‘Black Battalion’ (in service of Hitler’s Germany) killed in July 1941 his wife and small daughter in front of their home in L, (Vilno district), JS escaped to the forest and joined the partisans fighting against the Germans and Black Battalions alike. personal notes about his trip to communist China via Moscow, in 1962 (just two years before the Mao’s so-called Cultural revolution), were written by a person with academic background, who happened to act as a brief technical adviser to Chinese Chemical Industry, and who knowing well the communist system, made sharp and critical observations on the ground; often humorous and sarcastic and therefore never published at the time a mysterious phenomenon of ‘memory of a place’ throughout approximately 500 years, was experienced by a foreign tourist in Spanish city of Ronda. There is however, no logical explanation that could be offered to the described experience, other than probability based on historical facts, and perhaps intuition there were ‘political’ emigrants from communist countries, who never knew why they emigrated in the first place, other than just to earn some money for a while , , , , at the time of international terrorism, vigilance of passengers traveling by air becomes a paramount problem